Clevatess

Clevatess (クレバテス) is the title character of the series. He is one of the four Devil Beast Kings, the “King of the Moonlight” who rules the south of Edthea from Moon Mountain. After the humans of Hiden send thirteen heroes to kill him, he destroys their capital and, almost on a whim, takes in the kingdom’s last royal baby, Luna, to see whether humans are worth sparing.

Appearance

In his true form Clevatess is an enormous black, wolf-like beast with a white flame-like mane, a pair of ram horns, a single unicorn horn on his brow and many long, ribbon-like tails, some of which end in blades. The size of the form he takes depends on how much of his blood he uses: through the blood inside Alicia he can appear as a small black “puppy”.

To travel among humans he takes the shape of a slim young man with short black hair, red eyes and a single small horn on his forehead, which he leaves visible. The face is copied from the Hiden page boy Shiro Kleitos, who died in the ruins of Hiderat carrying Luna. Clevatess admits it was simply the only face he happened to remember. In this human form his body is weak and he can be knocked unconscious, which he tolerates in order to stay hidden.

Personality

Clevatess is arrogant, blunt and openly contemptuous of “hominids”, calling Luna a “monkey child” and treating Alicia as a tool he can work “like a rag”. He has almost no understanding of human needs at first: he expects babies to grow up in a few nights and orders a woman who has never given birth to produce milk.

Beneath this, he is deeply curious. A thousand years of emptiness after the age of heroes left him bored and jaded, and Luna is the first thing in a long time that interests him. His attachment grows steadily: he protects Luna at the Royal Furnace, rejects the idea of giving up on him after learning about Toa, and by the Solsein arc he travels across the continent to recover his kidnapped servant. He treats the people under his protection as “his” and will not tolerate anyone else laying a hand on them.

Abilities

• Shadow manipulation: Clevatess attacks from the shadows created by his own moonlight, and can hide objects and people inside shadows. He can create shadow doubles, raise a tower or a wall of shadow, and send out packs of shadow wolves (“Shadow Vanguard”). His technique Eternal Shadows takes away light itself.
• Devil Blood: Like every Devil Beast King he produces Devil Blood. He uses it to resurrect Alicia as an undead servant, to rebuild Nelluru’s body (fusing a troll’s strength into her arms), to talk telepathically with anyone carrying his blood, and to reshape bodies, for example shrinking Alicia into a child with Hiden ears.
• Reading minds: By touching a person with his horn he can “dig through” their memories, as he does with Naie.
• Domain power: His power is strongest inside his domain. Far from Moon Mountain he is weakened, but he learns to draw domain power from the Book of Toa of the Furnace that he carries.
• Ancient script: He can read the ancient Toan script without knowing why.
• Royal naming: The name “Luna” he gave the baby appeared on the throne of Hiden as a true royal name, something only the kingdom’s naming ceremony should be able to do.

History

The fall of Hiden

Clevatess had not seen humans for about a thousand years when thirteen heroes of Hiden attacked him at Moon Mountain. He killed them all, although Alicia managed to scratch his horn. Wanting to know why humans wished him dead, he marched on Hiderat, destroyed the city and killed its king. A dying woman begged him to save a baby, telling him that a child cannot choose the time and place it is born. Clevatess took the child and decided to watch it grow up, holding the fate of humanity on what he would see.

Raising Luna

Unable to feed the baby, he resurrected Alicia with his blood and named himself “Klen” and the baby “Luna”. On the road the group was captured by the Crows, where he met Nell, a wet nurse, and first encountered sorcery. He fought the troll Betty, and when Nell was nearly killed he rebuilt her and renamed her Nelluru. He also met Gart, a servant of Zavthier, and passed himself off as a servant of a Devil Beast King.

Learning that young devil beasts were disappearing and that wizards were behind it, he went after the army of Drel himself and cut it to less than half its size, but was sealed in Drel’s “Devil Blood Prison”. Only a part of him was trapped; his main body stayed free, and he let his enemies believe he had been defeated.

At the Royal Furnace he saved Luna from the possessed corpse of the late king, swapping the baby with a shadow, and found the Book of Toa that had ruled Hiden’s kings. Briefly disillusioned by the discovery that the Devil Beast Kings exist to answer the legend of a vanished race, he announced he would go home. Alicia shamed him into looking at Luna again, and he stayed. After the battle, T’ala appointed him Royal Magic Instructor, with the title of “King’s Hand” promised for when Luna is crowned.

Solsein

To understand magic well enough to teach Luna, and to track Vordin, Clevatess infiltrated the Solsein Seminary as the exchange student “Cren Bartis”. There he met the avatars of Zavthier and Laswell, and learned about the 200-year war with the heroes. When Alicia vanished into the mirror world, he raised a black tower in the school’s pond as bait, defeated the school’s awakened students, and revealed his identity to Ray Forrester, the friend of the boy whose face he wears. Vordin’s avatar stole the Book of the Furnace from him.

Recovering the power he had left inside the old blood prison, he followed the restored holy-site gates into the Chamber above the clouds and fought Vordin as an equal. After the reborn Toa killed Vordin and escaped, Clevatess left Solsein to return to Luna, but, exhausted and alone in a forest, he was ambushed by Jazhak, who tore out his heart and carried it away on a flying ship.

Relationships

Luna

Clevatess took Luna as an experiment, but the baby gradually becomes the center of his life. Luna calms him, and Luna’s light purple eyes are what pull him back from despair at the Furnace. Luna, for his part, adores him and wants to sleep in his fur.

Alicia Glenfall

Alicia is the only human who ever reached him in battle, and he resurrected her for that reason. Their relationship begins as master and slave but becomes a sharp-tongued partnership. He tells her he “never ordered her to stop being a hero”, and she in turn refuses to let him give up. Alicia is one of the few people who know his true identity.

Zavthier

Zavthier, the Devil Beast Queen of the West, has known him since his last rebirth. He calls her an “old hag”; she calls him a “chick”.

Vordin

The King of the North is Clevatess’s main enemy for much of the story. He bared his fangs at Clevatess’s people, and Clevatess answers in kind, although their final fight is also the first time Clevatess can fight at full strength against an equal.

Trivia

• He considers Alicia “the first human to scratch his horn”.
• His human tongue burns on Nelluru’s coffee.
• He claims to have lived for over two thousand years, but has no memory of who slew his previous incarnation.